Ebad Rahman
Baseball as a
Road to God
Professors John
Sexton & Mike Murray
May 7, 2012
The
Road to God as Personal Experience of Meaning
As
the semester ends, I ask myself what have I taken away from the course? What
are the insights that I genuinely can carry forth into my religious life and
community? In this paper, I will attempt to highlight what I believe to be the
most important insights I take away this semester by highlight significant
moments in several texts we have encountered. Using baseball, I will argue for
the need for personal and direct experience of the sacred—something organized
forms of religions are increasingly becoming alienating from as they become
institutionalized and material interests take precedence.
Religion for many people is
something to be avoided or seen as silly. How have the ideals, beliefs and
stories of what many of us take to be sublime moments of encounter with the
divine become so sullied and associated with abuse and hurt? I believe the
professionalization of baseball is insightful for understanding why many people
fear the abuses of religion in an institutionalized form. This is through the loss of underlying meaning
of those religions which can also been seen in the commercialization of
baseball whereby it loss the simplicity of the play element that Johan Huizinga
highlights in Homo Ludens. Huizinga
writes of how “with the increasing systemization and regimentation of sport,
something of the pure play-quality is inevitably lost”[1]. The
transformation of the simple play element into commercialized franchise points
to this transformation of a personal, meaningful endeavor into established structures
that become barriers to individualized experience especially through the
substation of meaning for profit.
This
commercialization of baseball is reflected in a statement Hal Chase “who was
unarguably the best player on the rooster of the Highlanders (or Yankees, as
the newspaper came to call them” makes in the middle of Eric Greenberg’s The Celebrant. Chase says in response to
the idea of him being a philosopher:
No. I am a
professional ballplayer. ‘Professional’ means only one thing. You do it for
money. But the bastards don’t let you go where the money’s best. They strap you
with the reserve clause and tie you up for life. The National Commission may be
bread and butter to you, but it’s cost me thousands. If I’d signed two years
before I did, when the leagues were at each other’s throats, I’d have made
three times the money. I hit twenty points over three hundred my first full
year, and that winter they sent me a contract that knocked me down five hundred
dollars. ‘Sure you did all right,’ they said, ‘but the club didn’t win.’ As if
it was my fault! I’d been busting my ass all year. Well, that’s when I saw my
way clear. I’m a professional ballplayer. I do it for money, and if there’s
more money in losing than in winning, shit if I care.[2].
This
passionate statement from Chase highlights how the struggle of an individual is
not valued when material interests take over and become the sole determining
factor for what is considered to be success. It is a reflection of our larger
society’s obsession with material things as the highest thing to which we can
aspire to do define ourselves by. It tells of how owners try to take advantage
of talent instead of letting it shine for its own sake. This then has an effect
on the players themselves, transforming heroes into losing their ideals and
entering the ‘rat race.’ Unfortunately, too many of our religious institutions
have given into this goal as well where it is only about increasing their
territory, authority, or power and not about allowing people to experience the
ineffable.
William James writes of the division
of the religious field into institutional and personal religion. “In the more
personal branch of religion,” he writes,
It is on the
contrary the inner dispositions of man himself which form the center of
interest, his conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his incompleteness.
And although the favor of the God, as forfeited or gained, is still an
essential feature of the story, and theology plays a vital part therein, yet
the acts to which this sort of religions prompts are personal not ritual acts,
the individual transacts the business by himself alone, and the ecclesiastical
organization, with its priests and sacraments and other go-betweens, sinks to
altogether secondary place. The relation goes direct from heart to heart, from
soul to soul, between man and his maker.[3]
It
is through this personal encounter with questions of our own feebleness, our
being alone and empty without meaning, that this personal relationship with the
sacred can emerge based on experience and reflection. The quote from James also
points to a major contention towards religion or God today. If through baseball
or love, or really anything that makes us realize there is more to life than
the material, we wish to have a relationship of appreciating and expressing awe
at the ineffable, it is usually institutional barriers that lead people not to
continue this quest for meaning. People are rightfully angered by the abuse
that occurs at the hands of people who claim to know what God’s will is for
certain and think they can pass judgment on peoples’ standing with God. People,
I believe, largely want to have that personal relationship with God that gives
soulful meaning to one’s lives. What they don’t want to deal with is other
peoples’ biases and psychological baggage that hinders them from their being
able to communicate with their personal maker.
I think James insight of this
division of religious experience is crucial to understanding how just as the
primacy of the play element has been largely lost in commercialized baseball,
so too has the essential experience of encountering the sacred has been clouded
and even stomped out in institutionalized forms of religion. Primacy is placed
instead on dogma, on repeating what individuals who are seen as giants, saints,
great scholars or even mystics of the past have said. But if we do not have experiences of our own,
repetition of books of creed, are not sufficient for truly having a
relationship with God. I recently have been struggling with this in a recent
lecture by an esteemed scholar of Islam. There was indeed beauty and awe at
just being able to see that here has a remarkably accomplished elderly scholar who continued to teach the religion and even prayed
standing. But in his lecture, his statement encouraging people to believe in
God and not have any doubt, fell short of encouraging people to experience the
sacred for themselves. As I reflected about this with a friend, we exclaimed
how just telling people not have to doubt and to have faith does not help for a
true religious experience. People must be encouraged to go on a journey to
investigate and question themselves in light of their existence, in light of
the world we live in, and the events that surround us.
It
is through reflection upon the events in our lives that push us to question
ourselves about what we stand for. This is also a personal encounter where we
must decide for ourselves based on our understanding of what is moral and in
congruence with our ideals rather than falling back to the institutions of our
society. It can make us question the institutional forms of practice in our
society by reflecting upon the shared humanity of others in a very personal way.
Here, the history of baseball also provides a lesson that can inspire us to do
question ourselves regarding how we often fall short of our professed ideals as
in the story of Jackie Robinson and the racism that prevented blacks from
joining and being one with white baseball players. In Pete Hamill’s Snow in August, Rabbi Hirsch “seemed to
have chosen baseball as his key to understanding America”.[4]
This is particularly insightful for us in speaking about the accessibility of
God to people and how institutional barriers are set up to exclude marginalized
figures and communities from having that access. It is also insightful for
taking us from just theory and feel-good-religion and ideals to think about the
concrete situation of black people in America. Theologically, this is an
important move to make—to take our religious ideals of shared humanity, wishing
for each other what we wish for ourselves, and putting it to the test of lived
reality. It is to push us to imagine what it would be like to be on the
receiving side of such cruelty and intolerance. It is to do what Michael did
when he
tried to imagine
what it must be like to be Robinson…What was it like to wake up every goddamned
morning and see that skin and know that some shmuck looked down on you just for
that?...How could that be? Michael’s anger rose in him and then faded. If I’m
angry, he thought, sitting here, still white or pink, how must Robinson feel?[5]
This
feeling must push us to act in the world, seeking aide from the Divine, but
also carrying out our responsibility God asks of us. It is to “trust in God and
tie your camel” as the famous saying of the Prophet Muhammad goes. It calls us
to act in the world voicing dissent against injustice rather than faulting
people for not believing enough—the mistake I believe Hamill engages in as he
tries to wrestle with the problem of the evil, particularly in light of the
atrocities of the Holocaust. Rather than absolve ourselves of responsibility by
appealing to the ineffable, we must set out as Red Barber did “to do a deep self
examination. I attempted to find out who I was. This did not come easily, and
it was not done lightly”[6].
Just as Barber engages with this process of question who he is and what he
stands for, and puts the ideals he had learned about being concerned for others
into action in the case of Jackie Robinson, so too must we confront the
questions that face us as we grow and interact with others. Not just others, we
must engage with our own beliefs and examine them, especially when we find our
religious ideals being twisted to exclude certain people or to privilege
others.
Keeping
an eye on the abuses of institutionalized forms of religion does not have to
push us to completely dismiss religious traditions as having nothing to offer
us in the modern world. It is rather to appropriate the tradition and make it
relevant and meaningful to us in our context. Here we can see the value that so
many characters in our readings derived from connecting themselves to a
tradition or story larger than themselves. It shows us a fallacy of modernity where
we are supposed to be uprooted from traditions, left to figure out meaning on
our own, supposedly through the saving light of reason with the Enlightenment
hope of cutting away all superstition and myth. As Eliade points out, this
process where repetition and cycles of life are “emptied of its religious
content, necessarily leads to a pessimistic vision of existence”.[7]
This I believe is an accurate description of lives without meaning beyond
survival or the amassing of wealth.
Perhaps
it is a modern obsession with facticity that pushes believers in the modern
world to become literalists and do away with metaphorical understanding of scriptural
narrations. I imagine pre-modern people were much more comfortable with telling
stories to derive meaning from rather than being obsessed with whether they
happened or not. It also shows us how scholars of scripture who go on for pages
in the commentaries of scripture about where a certain incident took place,
what they were wearing, eating, etc. often miss the point of the story. It is
like the novice ballgame spectator who only focuses on the ball. It takes experience
and wisdom to develop a sensitivity to notice and appreciate what is happening
in front of one’s eyes. As Gideon Clark remembers his father telling him,
“Gideon, there’s a lot more to watching a baseball game than keeping your eye
on the ball.”[8]
The value of spiritual masters, in the wisdom we might benefit from those who
have gone before us, lies when people like Matthew Clark genuinely want to
share that experience and teach us how to experience it for ourselves by paying
attention to the symphony on the field that is a metaphor for life.
If
we think of religious experience as related to aesthetics, we see the limitations
of an Enlightenment obsession with rationality and science—with that which can
be measured and calculated. We can then recognize something humanity may be
losing as it sees itself to be progressing from the shackles of myth that is
seen as false instead of as providing meaning. It is like Robert Coover’s
description of Cuss in The Universal
Baseball Association, Inc. whose “mockery encapsulates him, cuts him off
from any sense of wonder or mystery, make life nothing more than getting by
with the least pain possible…such a life seems less than human.”[9] Such
a void makes one not appreciate the richness of life and substitutes mere
survival if not enjoyment with living a meaningful life. Although this may seem
to be primitive, as Huizinga writes, “In this sphere of sacred play the child
and the poet are at home with the savage. His aesthetic sensibility has brought
the modern man closer to this sphere than the ‘enlightened man of the 18th
century ever was”[10].
The feelings that inspire “beauty, fright, and mystery” are not necessarily
products of a rational analysis of a piece of artwork or of nature, but rather,
it is with reconnecting with the play element in us from childhood, that we
rekindle a part of our humanity that the modern world is often at odds with.
Something
that accounts for the alienation we face when trying to experience the sacred
directly and personally is our distance from the natural environment of the
world. We increasingly live and work in urban spaces with apartment buildings,
mass produced furniture, food, clothes, where it is unthinkable to trace where
these products are coming from in terms of natural resources and the work that
has gone into making them. There is distance modern people experience from the
seasons of the year as well as the alternation of day and night. Baseball, A.
Barlett Giamatti writes, is special among the sports because “The game was
outdoors, on grass, in the sun. It began at winter’s end, and ended before
frost. It made the most of high skies, clement weather, and the times of
planting and growth.”[11]
This connection with nature provided a way to sit in front of a beautiful green
lawn mixed with earth. It is a telling metaphor for our attempts to hit a ball
into the horizons instead of remaining on the ground. Thus, “Baseball is at
home in the natural world, mindful of its own fragility.” This can be read as
also acknowledging our limitations and feebleness before the awesomeness of the
natural environment as Rabbi Heschel highlights. This reflection upon the
universe can push us out of our slumber to think there is nothing greater than
ourselves, to a higher being or presence who we are indebted to[12].
By
having standards more lofty than that of the judgment of other human beings and
material success, we embark on a journey to God. It is to lift our eyes to
heavens, rather than merely what others may think of that we can undergo a path
of renewal and transformation even when we make mistakes and slip up. These
mistakes may cause us to lose our careers in organized baseball, as it did to
Roy Hobbs, but still hold out a promise for making amends and possibly getting
right with God. I see The Natural as
the struggle of a man to finally break out of the corrupt greedy structures of
institutionalized baseball to start over again even if it costs him “Miss Paris”
and thirty five thousand dollars. We need hope and meaning to be able to make
choices that going beyond material considerations. For Hobbs it is the belief
in love for more than himself that ultimately motivates him. “You must win,
Roy,” Iris tells him. “Win for our boy.”[13]
Iris points something of meaning to Hobbs that is greater than all the riches
in the world. It is giving hope and meaning to future generations as
represented in their son. As she said earlier, “Without heroes we’re all plain
people and don’t know how far we can go.”[14]
Meaning and significance is thus given through aspiration that Hobbs can embody
for others. Yet it is through his efforts at trying to be an inspiration, and
not necessarily his success in doing so, that is the standard of success if we
take the personal approach of valuing an individual by their intention.
Institutional and commercial standards do not have room for this sort of
‘measurement.’ An attentive to the sacred can help us appreciate the efforts to
be true to a higher calling even amidst our failures. This is only through an
intimate knowledge of the struggles of an individual and judging through eyes
of mercy rather than a cold calculating analysis of the ‘hard facts’.
When
we went to Citi Fields earlier this month, a classmate remarked, “I wonder how
the field would look without all the advertisements.” It was a profound
reflection I thought and I looked across the stands for the numerous ads that
on display for the duration of the game. It is a metaphor for how bombarded we
are with distractions that prevent us from appreciating what is in front of us.
For this reason there truly is wisdom in the injunction to take time out of our
daily monotonous routines to undergo a pilgrimage or journey for purification
and retrospection. This push us to think about how perhaps we are approaching
faith and religion from the wrong door if we try to simply get at it through an
appeal to rationality and facticity? Perhaps, the road to God, like love, is
about openness to experience. This is what baseball can offer us when we try to
understand the thrill and love for the game that it inspires in a child who
identifies with players and a team and casts his hopes with the Dodgers for
example. There is more to life than simple calculations. If it were just about
calculations, the newspaper stats would have been sufficient for Doris Goodwin.
But there was something in the experience of her watching the game and keeping
score herself with the hope of pleasing and sharing in the joy of recounting
the game to her father that made it worthwhile. What I take away from the class
is that only through a personal relationship with the ineffable, where we
recognize the limitations of the rational process, and allow ourselves to
experiences that do not show up in graphs and charts, but nonetheless are real,
can we approach God. We must encourage people to embark on personal journeys to
find themselves and find their relationship with God through mystery and awe
rather than appealing to accept religious dogma without experiencing the sacred
for themselves.
Barber,
Red. "On Jackie Robinson." The Greatest Baseball Stories Ever Told.
By Jeff Silverman. Guilford, CT: Lyons, 2001.
Coover,
Robert. The Universal Baseball Association: Inc. J Henry Waugh, Prop.
[S.l.]: New American Library (A Plume Book), 1968. Print.
Eliade,
Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1959. Print.
Giamatti,
A. Bartlett. and Kenneth S. Robson. A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball
Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 1998. Print.
Greenberg, Eric Rolfe. The
Celebrant: A Novel. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1983. Print.
Hamill,
Pete. Snow in August. Thorndike, Me.: Thorndike, 1997. Print.
Heschel, Abraham Joshua. God
in Search of Man; a Philosophy of Judaism. New York: Farrar, Straus &
Cudahy, 1955. Print.
Huizinga, Johan. Homo
Ludens; a Study of the Play-element in Culture. Boston: Beacon, 1955.
Print.
James, William. The
Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York:
Modern Library, 1936. Print.
Kinsella, W. P. The Iowa
Baseball Confederacy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986. Print.
[1] Huizinga,
Johan. Homo Ludens; a Study of the Play-element in Culture. Boston:
Beacon, 1955, 197.
[2] Greenberg, Eric Rolfe. The Celebrant: A Novel.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1983, 172.
[3] James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A
Study in Human Nature. New York: Modern Library, 1936, 17.
[5] Hamil, Snow in August, 179.
[6] Barber,
Red. "On Jackie Robinson." The Greatest Baseball Stories Ever Told.
By Jeff Silverman. Guilford, CT: Lyons, 2001, 133.
[7] Eliade, Mircea.
The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1959, 107.
[8] Kinsella,
W. P. The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986,
248.
[9] Coover,
Robert. The Universal Baseball Association: Inc. J Henry Waugh, Prop.
[S.l.]: New American Library (A Plume Book), 1968, 252.
[10] Huizinga, 26.
[11] Giamatti,
A. Bartlett. and Kenneth S. Robson. A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball
Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 1998, 56.
[12] Heschel, Abraham Joshua. God in Search of Man; a
Philosophy of Judaism. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1955, 112.
[14] Ibid, 148.
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